Formal Ship Safety Assessment

Formal safety assessment in ship design and operation may offer great potential incentives. The application of it may  

Improve the performance of the current fleet, be able to measure the performance change and ensure that new ships are good designs. 

Ensure that experience from the field is used in the current fleet and that any lessons learned are incorporated into new ships. 

Provide a mechanism for predicting and controlling the most likely scenarios that could result in incidents. 

The possible benefits have already been realised by many shipping companies. For example, the P O Cruises Ltd in the UK has reviewed the implementation of risk assurance methods as a strategic project and proposed short-term/medium-term and long-term objectives (Vie and Stemp (1997)). Its short-term/medium-term objectives are to provide a reference point for all future risk assurance work to develop a structure chart that completely describes vessel operation to complete a meaningful hazard identification as the foundation of the data set to enable identification of realistic options for vessel improvement to be a justified record of modifications adopted or rejected and to be capable of incorporating and recording field experience to ensure that the knowledge is not lost. The idea of formal safety assessment may well be fitted to the above objectives in order to improve the company s performance. 

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Address the issues in formal ship safety assessment. 

Chapter 4 describes both the offshore safety case approach and formal safety assessment of ships. The current practices and the latest development in safety assessment in both the marine and offshore industries are described. The relationship between the offshore safety case approach and formal ship safety assessment is described and discussed. The study of risk criteria in marine and offshore safety assessment is carried out. The recommendations on further work required are finally given. 

Chapter 11 concludes the book by summarising the results and outlining the contributions to formal ship safety assessment. 

A formal ship safety assessment framework proposed by the UK MCA consists of the following five steps ... 

Software safety analysis is another area where further study is required. In recent years, advances in computer technology have been increasingly used to fulfil control tasks to reduce human error and to provide operators with a better working environment in ships. This has resulted in the development of more and more software intensive systems. However, the utilisation of software in control system has introduced new failure modes and created problems in the development of safety-critical systems. The DCR-1996 has dealt with this issue in the UK offshore industry. In formal ship safety assessment, every safety-eritical system also needs to be investigated to make sure that it is impossible or extremely unlikely that its behaviour will lead to a catastrophic failure of the system and also to provide evidence for both the developers and the assessment authorities that the risk associated with the software is acceptable within the overall system risks (Wang (1997)). 

More test case studies also need to be carried out to evaluate and modify formal ship safety assessment and associated techniques and to provide more detailed guidelines for the employment of them. This would enable validation of them and can also direct the further development of flexible risk modelling and decision making techniques and facilitate the technology transfer to industries. 

The method presented in the paper called as the SSADC (Ship Safety Assessment in Damage Conditions) method is a risk-based method. It is based on assessment of the ship performance and risk assessment. It enables to quantify the risk and use it a measure of a ship safety. The method is of non-prescriptive character. It may be treated as a prescriptive method form the formal point of view if the structure of requirements in the form of any known regulations are used. 

FangQ,YangZ, HuS,WangJ. 2005 Formal safety assessment and application of the navigation simulators for preventing human error in ship operations. Journal of Maritime Science Applied 2005 4(3), Rotterdam Balkema... 

The public inquiry into the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster was an important milestone in ship safety in the United Kingdom. It resulted in actions such as changes to marine safety-related rules and regulations, the introduction of the International Safety Management (ISM) Code for the safe operation of ships and for pollution prevention, and the development of a formal safety assessment process in the shipping industrial sector [17]. 

The assessment of ship safety has become an increasingly important issue. The techniques of risk and cost-benefit assessments are used in the ship-safety decision-making process. The approach is called a formal safety assessment (FSA) and is composed of the following five steps [17] ... 

Describe the formal safety assessment (FSA) approach used to assess safety in the area of shipping. 

Wang, J. Offshore Safety Case Approach and Formal Safety Assessment of Ships. Journal of Safety Research 33, no. 1 (2002) 81-115. 

Demonstrate how the adoption of safety analysis methods can facilitate the application of formal safety assessment of ships. 

Chapter 5 discusses the inception of Formal Safety Assessment (FSA), originally proposed by the UK Maritime Coastguard Agency, in the maritime applications. The FSA is applied to fishing vessels with an illustrative example. The application of the FSA framework to containerships is also described. Detailed discussions on several aspects of FSA s application to ship design and operation are given. 

Formal Safety Assessment of Ships and Its Relation to Offshore Safety Case Approach... 

It is clear that it would be possible to reduce marine accidents by good design, training, and operation in an appropriate systematic management system. As the public concern regarding maritime safety increases, more and more attention has been directed to the wide application of formal safety assessment of ships as a regulatory tool. It is believed that the adoption of such a tool in ship design and operation will reduce maritime risks to a minimum level. 

Wang J., (2001) Current Status of Future Aspects of Formal Safety Assessment of Ships , Safety Science, Vol. 38, pp. 19-30. 

Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) has as its objective the development of a framework of safety requirements for shipping in which risks are addressed in a comprehensive and cost effective manner. The adoption of FSA for shipping represents a fundamental cultural change, from a largely reactive approach, to one, which is integrated, proactive and soundly based upon the evaluation of risk. 

There are many different types of ships such as fishing vessels, cruising ships, bulk carriers and containerships. It has b n noted that different types of ships have different characteristics in terms of available failure data, the corresponding safety regulations, etc. As a result, the formal safety assessment framework described above should be applied on a flexible basis. For example, for fishing vessels, due to the poor safety culture in the fishing industry and lack of reliable failure data, the FSA framework described above may not be entirely tq>plied. A modified FSA framework with a more qualitative nature may be more useful as will be described later. In contrast, the FSA framework described above may be relatively easily applied to containerships. 

The previous Chapters of this book have described the formal safety assessment framework in ship design and operations, and also a range of safety assessment and decision making approaches. The reasons behind the development of such approaches have been explained. Many valid reasons for using the developed safety analysis approaches have also been discussed. 

The formal safety assessment framework has been described in a generic sense to be applicable to all design and operational problems of ships. It can be used as a basis for the development of various safety analysis methods and decision making procedures. 

It would be useful if more test cases are applied to the described safety assessment and decision making approaches in order to further demonstrate their applicability. It would also be useful if more powerful and flexible risk modelling and decision making tools are developed to facilitate formal safety assessment of ships. 

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